Jake

Writer’s Cut!

I should talk about this in a later-game thread. non-plot spoiler, but I will put this in spoiler tags anyway, alludes to thoughts on greater themes of the game and series maybe best saved for when youve played it all:

This is close to my arc with it. I got to the end and literally sat back from my computer in my chair and said "huh." And then was quiet for a little while. Then paced around my house for ten minutes thinking . Then went and excitedly told my wife all my thoughts on it because I had no one else to tell because nobody knew the game existed yet (she said "cool" or something, and I can't blame her because it WAS COOL).

Unrelated to anything, the structure of Return has made me think back to 2 and how it also told its story through a frame flashback, and opens on even more storytelling (Bart and Fink). Monkey Island 2 also has moments of the events of the past game being seen through this murky lens (“the Voodoo Lady said SHE did in LeChuck!”). Return takes that and runs with it. Not just the frame story but the lure guild where you take your story and keep pushing it until the truth gets farther and farther from you in the fog. Storytelling, subjective truth and reality, unreliable narrators, and just letting things run on for too long out of blind excitement come up a lot in the series! Not sure what that means but 🤷‍♂️ Anyway we are now crazy deep in frames! This isn’t quite right but almost, if you tilt your head and squint, we have Guybrush in a park telling his kid, who is reenacting with his friend at the fair, the story of Guybrush hanging from a rope in a hole, telling Elaine about the time he told two pirates on a beach about the events of Monkey Island 1.

Wally's doormat is a map of the inside of his store, with a little "you are here" dot on the doormat.

I like this read a lot, though I think it gets complicated (in an exciting way!) by Elaine revealing at the end that she's got a map to some lost island and they're about to go there. I read that moment as "real" and not in the imagination of the park. But it's all very fuzzy and misaligned... and I really like it that way. I like the stuff you said about Guybrush seeing everyone else crash themselves against the rocks of the Secret too. In general I like that the game is not "about" just one thing. It's not some beautiful multilayered metaphor or anything, it's kind of raggedy and has about six endings on top of each other, but for me that worked really well. From the beginning of that walk and talk with Elaine, through finding the note in the back of the scrapbook, I feel like Return tried its best to close the book on a bunch of different layers and throughlines of the story, from the most literal in-universe ones up to explicitly meta conversations about the game series itself. The different moments didn't all hit for me equally, but by the end I don't think there was any more I wanted from it than what I got. ESPECIALLY if you take into account that Curse is still valid, Tales is still valid, hell even Escape is still valid if you want. I said in some previous pre-spoiler threads that one of my favorite things about Monkey Island has always been the sense of the world getting dogeared and frayed and kind of crackling with dangerous energy when you get too close to the edge of it, and Return was... all about that. I think about the final shot of Guybrush on the bench often. I really like the ending. I can really feel myself starting to ramble so I will stop and eventually collect my thoughts better! There's too much

This game has approximately one infinity little details that are good. I'm going to list a few of the ones I liked here. These are probably bigger things than the main "Details of Monkey Island" thread, because I'm not feeling the need to drill so deep yet, but it's in that spirit: Stuff that didn't need to be there but made me happy or excited me. Not sure how to spoiler tag this so I'll just go whole hog, but if that isn't necessary we can just leave them open?? A thing in the prologue: A cool thing in part 1: A couple good details in part 4: There are many more but there are a few that came to mind when thinking back on my playthrough.

It's a thread where maybe we should also put everything we say inside spoiler blocks? Who can say. Anyway hi Dom! Here: I've added something.

Yeah it’s great. Unexpected, but totally fits. So much good subtle stuff going on in there too, like the background changing after they follow the parents to the edge of the scene.

Did anyone ever say it would explain the ending, or just that it would start there? 🤔

Noooo sorry, I was doing some last minute forum shuffling and it might have caught you in it! I'm done meddling now, I promise.

Use this thread if you've just started playing and want to talk about the early game, without getting into the rest. If you've played the Prologue and are just getting into Part One, but don't want late game spoilers, this is the thread for you. My simple take is... I love how this game starts. It's absolutely nothing I would have expected. It was a delight to be playing through and having absolutely no idea what was happening, or would happen next, until the ground finally slowly came in underneath me.

The game is out! Spoiler forum is up! Here is a little (spoiler-free) info about how it works. If you're ready to wade in, go for it but remember, it IS a spoiler forum! ☠️ YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED ☠️ If you want to keep talking about Return and Monkey island in general in a spoiler-free way, there are plenty of threads here in General Discussion. Enjoy downloading

Haha oh no, the curse of this thread continues!

Forum News! FYI there will be a spoiler-only subforum going up tomorrow morning at the same time as the game coming out! I'm sure there will be some people who don't want to talk about Return spoilers yet, either because they can't play for a while, or don't want to see any of them until they've completed the game, which is why we'll be quarantining them in a dedicated forum for a while. The forum also has a nice "ignore" function that can filter the spoiler subforum and all of its posts out of your browsing experience, if you'd like. Eg spoiler forum threads won't show up in a "new post" search or activity feed list. Within the spoiler subforum itself we're requesting that people not use spoilers in thread titles, and tag their threads with "Part X" tags (or a few others like "early game" / "late game") so if you do decide to wade into the spoiler forum mid-playthrough, you can choose what you want to engage with. In the meantime despite the temptation, I don't think it's worth "pre-creating" a bunch of spoiler threads, because they'll just get filled with mush in the next few hours while people go stir crazy. I kindly ask that you wait until you've actually played the game a bit and have something spoiler-filled to say before starting a spoiler thread! I think that also means this thread will close when the game goes live or shortly after. End of an era! So live it up in here for the next 10 hours or so.

Marius re your spoiler: Im sure it was! 👕 I beat #Mojole #181 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 6/6 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤 🖤💚🖤🖤🖤 🖤💚💚🖤🖤 💚💚💚💚🖤 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

Tales had a shorter window and less press, but I also feel like the landscape of games was smaller then so you didn’t have to be as loud. There were far fewer big service games running always churning out news, and far far fewer independent developers and publishers out on social media and news sites talking about their games. So you may be right that it’s the same! It’s very hard to tell. We’ll see.

👕 I beat #Mojole #180 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 5/6 🖤🖤🖤🖤💛 🖤💚🖤🖤🖤 🖤💚🖤🖤💛 🖤💛💛🖤🖤 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

I suspect Return will eclipse it.

Hey folks, here are a few guidelines for this forum: Before starting a new thread, look to see if your comments could fit in an existing one! If not, feel free to start new threads! Please tag your post appropriately! Every post will eventually be tagged as "return spoilers" but beyond that, try to add one tag for the latest part of the game you're discussing. The recommended tags are: Early Game (for the prologue, menus, any very early content up through the start of part 1) Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, etc (pick just one, for the farthest part of the game you're talking about) Late Game (for any discussion that you want to have about the end of the game, the whole game, any post-game thoughts) Please keep spoilers out of your thread titles. And finally, remember that this is a SPOILER FORUM. By visiting it, you might be spoiled! You'll have no one to blame but yourself by coming in here at all. ⚠️ If you don't want to be here, you can ignore this forum by going back to the General Discussion area, and clicking "IGNORE." It will be hidden from search results until you stop ignoring it.

Steam bundles and promos used to be handled more clunkily than they are now, they were a lot closer to games than to just being a collection of metadata. Strange that it’s still showing up like that!

Paging @Marius

👕 I beat #Mojole #179 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 5/6 🖤🖤🖤🖤💛 💚🖤🖤🖤🖤 💚🖤🖤💛🖤 💚🖤💚💛🖤 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

Whoa!

It’s not identical to the system in Thimbleweed Park: Delores, but is similar. You get between one and two verbs per object, depending on the complexity of the object. If it’s a door you can look at it, and also open it (or close it if it’s already open), or if it’s a person you can look at them or talk to them. It seems like a streamlined system compared to SCUMM games, but also seems to have more complexity and discovery to it than modern one-click systems like Telltale’s.